Happenstance played role in upcoming Led Zeppelin reissue: ‘Lo and behold, there it was’

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As Jimmy Page got deeper into a catalog-spanning reissue campaign for Led Zeppelin, the guitarist began to worry that he might not have as much material for the underrated 1976 album Presence.

Possessing, as he does, a producer’s in-depth knowledge of every session Zeppelin undertook, Page had been able to find stacks of additional material — ready made for the companion discs he’s including with each individual remastered album.

That wasn’t the case, however, with Presence. As Page went through Led Zeppelin’s archival material, he began to wonder how he would complete things.

Then, something amazing happened.

“The only thing that turned up that I’d literally forgotten about, out of all of these tapes and hundred and hundreds of hours of listening was: I had an early mix, a studio mix of Presence, and that had extra material on it,” Page tells Radio.com. “And that was the album I thought, with all of this chronological opening of everything, that might present a problem, and lo and behold, there it was. It was a deliverance.”

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